Merry Christmas!!

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Here’s to you and yours on this day of gluttony and excess! May the bows and packaging of blatant consumerism be reflected in our landfills for generations to come as we blindly celebrate in a tradition created for us by all the corporate entities that make America and all other “first” nations the plunderers that we are! May our laughter and cheer drown out all the cries of suffering around the world induced by our outrageously affluent lifestyles! Let the “third” world feel the digging of our heels into their backs as we buy cheap goods made possible by such practices as child labor, slave labor, and sweatshops around the world set up by the likes of Wal-Mart, K-Mart, JC Penney, The Gap, and many other of our favorite stores! Rejoice! For Jesus Christ would have wanted it that way! For certainly he was being ironic when he said such things as “The meek shall inherit the Earth” and “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than it is for a rich man to pass through the gates of heaven!”

And here’s to a wonderful new year, one rife with the drudgery of the workplace that we chain ourselves to, despising every instant, just so we can gain enough purchasing power to buy the latest gizmo we are convinced we need, adding yet another created want to the heap, creating more waste, demanding more of our time, and consuming all our energies so we are totally unable to enter or maintain enduring relationships with our loved ones! Way to go, America! Your lifestyle stands out as a shining standard that all nations on Earth wish to emulate, ensuring the mutual and utter devastation of the planet due to air pollution, ground pollution, water pollution, destruction of natural resources, and the obliteration of all living systems on the planet! Keep up that denial and self-absorbed attitude! You will need that, since the worst is yet to come! God bless America!

Comments

Anonymous said…
We spent our Christmas sleeping in, visiting the grave of my wife's parents and walking into the forest here, an hour south of Tokyo.

We watch television and most of the American news is concerned with how well or not well, retailers are doing. We keep hearing how this month is crucial for corporate profits and economic growth. What we never hear, in a country supposedly based on a spiritual mandate, is the cost this month imposes on the individual human spirit. We are educated and socialized (same thing, really) into believing that this is a time for family, friends and love. This, of course, is part of the brainwashing and semantic overlap the media creates whereby we come to believe consumerism is love and love is consumerism. We become the cogs in a great machine of deception and our soul is rendered incapable of knowing, of feeling the reason for our existence. Whatever that reason is, I don't think it's to pad the wallets of those who have far too many resources when far too many need those resources. If we buy into this idea of consumer slavery we are committing crimes against humanity. Forget laying blame on the corporate executive who makes 1,000 times what the worker who produces his wealth makes. Forget the President, VP, the Senators and Congressmen who all work for the same company. It's about you and I and whether we have the courage to feel and think for our community and the rest of humanity, not only for ourselves. I'm not there yet and I may never get there.

I'm not dismissing the possibility that technological innovation and corporate greed may yet have a place in bringing us all together. The "external nervous system" is possibly being created right in front of our eyes. It's likely that an external network is being formed and that might actually be how we, in the far future, become one. However, the values perpetrated by America create the wrong paradigm. It is a separate, devisive paradigm which rewards the baser human traits and penalizes the higher traits. This will have to change.

On this day, let's celebrate those higher traits and reflect on our own behaviors.

And speaking for myself, I suck a lot of the time.
5:54 AM
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